We’re going to start with senior magistrates and here we can engage in at least a little bit of cross-polis comparison because these most senior magistrates tend to be the only sort that show up regularly in our sources. As noted last time, the general term for these senior magistrates was archons (ἄρχοντες, archontes, literally “leaders”, from ἄρχω, “to begin, to be first” and thus “to lead, to rule”. Note also ἀρχή, “first, preeminent” but also “power, empire or an office”.), but every poleis‘ archons were likely to be a bit different, with their own particular local terms, numbers and sets of powers.

Numbers however is the first key difference here. Most modern governments have a single magistrate – a president or prime minister – from whom flows all executive power, delegated down to subordinates who are often unelected and whose power thus derives from the one chief magistrate at the top. In some cases, that power is less vested in the person of a prime minister as it is in the collective cabinet (where the cabinet wields power and notionally takes responsibility collectively), but there is still one line of power, reaching from the people, through a single executive person or body, then down to many functionaries whose role is to implement the will of the single executive.

This is not how ancient Greek magistrates (or indeed, ancient magistrates generally) worked.

Instead, Greek magistrates were a product of efforts to weaken royal power by dividing it, which of course only works if executive power was truly divided, that is vested in different autonomous figures. Thus it is important to not to see these magistrates as organized into a “chain of command” or even engaged in collective decision-making. Instead, the best way to understand most magistrates is to imagine them as individual actors whose powers are restricted to a single sphere of action (that is, they have a specific job) and that a city might have many of them. Thus there isn’t one executive power in a polis, but many. Even in cases where magistrates function as a board, it is often the case that each member of that board carries the full power of the magistracy – it is a board of ten magistrates, not a board of ten acting as a magistrate, which means the individuals can act independent of the board.

So instead of one executive, what you have in a polis are many independent, little executives, each with a fragment of the overall executive power. And if you are thinking, “that sounds like an awkward system, since magistrates might be working at cross-purposes with each other”, well, yes. There’s a reason we don’t generally structure governments this way. But the Greeks did and they liked it that way, because this sort of structure keeps the powers of the magistrates in check.

So what might the high magistrates of a polis do exactly? Though there are many different configurations for high magistrates, they tend to do the same basic set of jobs (again, split up usually). You need magistrates to 1) lead the armies and fleets (not usually a distinct job; strategoi are generals and admirals), 2) manage and organize the law courts (which may or may not include making summary judgements in minor cases), and 3) conduct key religious rituals on behalf of the community. Those who have been here a while will note how this maps on neatly to the three roles of kingship (chief general, chief judge, chief priest), though the shift from royal law maker-enforcer-judge to “court scheduling specialist” is a meaningful one.

So at Athens, we have the initial three archons which slot neatly into these roles: the polemarch (πολέμαρχος, polemarchos, lit, “war-leader”) was in charge of the army, the archon basileus (ἄρχων βασιλεύς, lit, “king archon“) who filled in for the king in religious rituals which required his presence but had no broader non-religious powers, and finally the eponymous archon, who lent his name to the year (“in the year of the archonship of so-and-so” being a standard dating form) and ran the courts. It seems fairly clear that early on the eponymous archon often stood as judge and initially also presided over the meetings of the Athenian boule and ekklesia as its chief magistrate (and so supervising the law making process as well).

Over time these offices in Athens were weakened or supplanted, breaking power up further in order to buttress the democracy against both oligarchic power (remember: strong magistrates are a tool of “the few”) and tyranny (strong magistrates have a good position to overthrow the democracy and institute a tyranny). The eponymous archon slowly lost most of his power; the boule came to be a select council which ran the ekklesia and in turn there was an even smaller select council, the prytaneis who acted as a select of the boule and presided over it. Meanwhile, the polemarch became mostly an organizational, “managing the home front” figure, while the war leading role was replaced with a board of ten generals, the strategoi. The strategoi ended up being a pretty key office. As everyone understood you needed generals with expertise, it was an office where one could be elected multiple times in succession and was never determined by lot the way the archonships were; that meant a capable politician could secure a permanent role in the state by getting elected over and over again as strategos; this is for instance the position Pericles held.

As for the courts, these got bigger even as the eponymous archon got smaller and so the Athenians created six lesser archons, the thesmothetai (θεσμοθέται, sing. θεσμοθέτης; “law-giver”) who operated the courts (but did not dispense justice; these are jury courts). Still the eponymous archon kept some vestigial legal powers, like a supervisory role over the epikleroi, sometimes translated as “heiresses” (although that’s not quite right – they weren’t and indeed under Athenian law couldn’t inherit, but rather property was passing through them to legally valid inheritors – they were required to marry into their paternal line in order to generate a husband who could be such a valid inheritor – which in most poleis had to be male.).

At Sparta, the ephors and the two hereditary Spartan kings filled the role of high magistrates; the existence of the two hereditary kings is, we know, quite unusual but the board of ephors is not. We know that several other poleis had ephors and evidently on Crete they had kosmoi (described by Aristotle but epigraphically attested at Eleutherna, Eltynia, Gortyn, Knosos, Lyktos, etc.; Inventory 1159, 1160, 1164, 1169, 1175) whose powers were apparently much like the ephors. Ephors and kosmoi appear invariably as boards of officials with a wide range of executive powers: the Spartan ephors (of whom we are best informed) handled most foreign policy, served as a high court and could propose legislation to the assembly. At Sparta the ephors had the job of making sure the kings did their job, including their religious role, but also had some of their own ritual functions, like the ritual declaring of war on the helots (Plut. Lyc. 28.4). As you might imagine, a board of magistrates with such wide-ranging powers tended to be tools of “the few” and indeed Aristotle notes that the Spartan ephors were easy to bribe (Arist. Pol. 2.1271a) while the Cretan kosmoi monopolized power to produce an effectively hereditary oligarchy (Arist. Pol. 2.1272b). Also notably it seems like one of the ephors or kosmoi was always eponymous, giving their name to the year just like the Athenian eponymous archon.

Athens and Sparta weren’t the only poleis with these kinds of high officials, of course, but as noted the magistrates of other poleis are often very poorly attested. Thebes had an eponymous archon (of unclear powers) and at least two polemarchs by 382 (Inventory, 455); the Boeotian confederation, of which Thebes was the leading power, also had seven Boiotarchs (Βοιωτάρχης, a fusion of βοιωτία (the name of the region) and that ἀρχ- root meaning “leader”), elected for a term of one year who led the combined armies of the Boeotian poleis. Argos’ assembly had a presiding magistrate attested in inscriptions, who was assisted by a secretary with a six month term of office; they also had board of five strategoi who commanded the army reported by Thucydides as well as a board of treasurers (ἀρτῦναι, artunai; Inventory, 604).

Demiourgoi (“public workers”) appear in a number of poleis, often as a board or group of magistrates (Larissa had these, Arist. Pol. 1275b; Inventory 696), though the role of demiourgoi seems to vary from polis to polis as you might expect with so general a name (at Larissa they were apparently able to make new citizens, but the title was also used for the officials of the Hellenistic-era Achaean League (a federal alliance of poleis) and the representatives of the Peloponnesian League (Dem. 18.157) among quite a few others.) That said, demiourgos is a word with a wide range of meanings, to include magistrates but also skilled workers in public employ as well as being used in a philosophical sense to mean a kind of “creator god”, so it’s a tricky word.

All told then what should you expect in terms of the high magistrates of a polis? Well, first that the key jobs here are leading the army, organizing the courts (and/or acting as a court as a board) and filling religious roles; you should expect these jobs to split over multiple magistrates. In democracies, offices that don’t require a lot of technical know-how may be selected by lot, but the rest tend to be elected (in oligarchies often from a subset of the polis, defined by wealth). In either case, magistrates serve relatively short terms, usually just one year (but sometimes a little longer or shorter). It is generally only the “specialist” offices (read: generals) that can be held multiple times consecutively. The more powerful the magistracy, the more likely it is to be organized as a board of magistrates.

Now those are the most important and central magistrates, but a large polis with thousands of politai (and even more non-citizens) is going to need a slew of other state officers to handle a lot of the day to day matters. That brings us neatly to minor magistrates …

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101, Part IIb: Archons“, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-24.